How to Save Time For Small Business Owners

Are you looking to save time?

Ask any small to medium business owner, and they will tell you that Time Management
is
one of the most challenging aspects of running their business. How much time are you
spending with your head glued to the phone or email answering inquiries from your
customer base? Do you find you are spending huge chunks of your day answering what
seems
like the same question you answered 100 times earlier in the day?

Entrepreneurs are victims of their own success. You have done the leg work, made
those
connections and now, now when you should be managing your business you are still in
the
thick of it. Perhaps you started your business being able to put the focus on the
one or
two loyal customers you had, and now that you are acquiring more and more clients,
you
are not able to give the same level of personal attention.

Personal Trainers and Fitness Instructors start out this way much of the time. With
one
or two clients, they are able to routinely keep in touch, and provide personalized
workouts and dietary ideas. Now that their business is expanding, this proves to be
unsustainable.

So what's the solution to these Time Management problems? Automation or using the
current fancier description Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Using our
example
from above, as our customer, we would be able to create a website or use an existing
website that allows our Personal Trainer friend to tailor and assign an exercise and
diet regimen to each of their clients. The CRM Software will send out automatically
scheduled reminders with tips and suggestions. This would also allow clients to
engage
with Personal Trainer as well by providing a mechanism to ask questions, and receive
responses. Clients will stay engaged, on track, and ultimately be more successful
without the Personal Trainer having to run ragged managing the whole show!

CRM is not a new concept. Having worked in the IT department of two major Canadian
banks, I can assure you that very little is done by hand anymore. Almost everything
is
done by computers, and there is good reason for it; there is no way companies could
manually process the information they have to - given time and money constraints -
as
efficiently or accurately as computers do.

Ask yourself how much time you could save by automating some of your business
processes.